On a blazing August day weeks after a hotly contested primary election, candidates from up and down the Democratic ballot crammed into the Vermont Democratic Party’s newly opened campaign headquarters in Montpelier, touting their party unity heading into the general election campaign cycle.
The thermostat of the supposedly air-conditioned State Street office read a clammy 84 degrees. Candidates fanned themselves with paper copies of their prepared speeches and apologetically skipped entire passages to wrap the rally sooner.
“You know, they warned me that getting into a statewide campaign can be a really heated affair,” joked Deputy Secretary of State Chris Winters to playful boos from his colleagues. “Come on, dad joke!”
Since Vermonters cast their ballots three weeks ago, tensions appeared to have cooled between state Sen. Becca Balint, D-Windham, who won the Democratic nomination for Vermont’s open U.S. House seat, and her top competitor, Lt. Gov. Molly Gray.
“This morning, Senator Balint and I had a productive conversation, and there will be more in the weeks ahead,” Gray told the room. “But I’m deeply pleased to be standing here in unwavering support of her candidacy, because I know she’ll be fighting for child care, and for paid family and medical leave, and for housing, and that water and sewer infrastructure we keep talking about, and for climate action.”
In the weeks leading up to the primary election, Gray’s and Balint’s sparring grew increasingly intense. Gray repeatedly decried the influx of PAC money pouring into the state to benefit Balint, nearly $1 million of which was revealed after the election to have come from a single cryptocurrency executive, and called on her competitor to denounce the outside spending. Balint ultimately won the election by a 24-point margin.
At Tuesday’s rally, Gray said, “I also know that together with Peter Welch she’ll be doing everything she can in her power to protect our democracy, to uphold constitutional and fundamental rights and champion comprehensive campaign finance reform.”
When she stepped up to the podium, Balint first offered a special thanks to state Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden, who dropped out of the Democratic House primary in May and threw her support behind Balint. When Ram Hinsdale withdrew, Balint said on Tuesday, “she said to me that she knew that the sum of us was greater than the parts. And that’s why we’re standing here together, to improve the lives of Vermonters together.”
As Ram Hinsdale spoke, she asked for Balint to stand beside her at the podium. Prior to Aug. 9, Ram Hinsdale said, she told news outlets that the primary race was a chance “to give Vermonters the opportunity to say, ‘May the best woman win.’”
“And in this moment, Vermont chose the best woman for this moment, the best woman for what Vermont needs from this country, and the best one for what the country needs from Vermont,” Ram Hinsdale said, choking up.
Balint also thanked Gray “for the partnership that we had in the Statehouse.” Both candidates launched their congressional campaigns before the Legislature convened for the 2022 session in January, where Balint and Gray worked together in the state Senate chamber.
“It is not easy to be competitors in a chamber and make it work,” Balint said on Tuesday. “We made a commitment to each other at the beginning of the session, that we were going to put Vermonters first every single day, and that’s what happened. We did not let any rivalry we had on the political field get in the way of good policy, so I’m so grateful to you for that, Molly.”
Other candidates offered congratulations and thanks to their former primary rivals. Patricia Preston, who came in third in the Democratic lieutenant gubernatorial contest, thanked the primary winner and former Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman for offering her advice before their first debate.
“I turned to David and I said to him, ‘This is my first debate ever. What advice can you give me at the twelfth hour?’” Preston recounted. “And David met me where I was and gave me really good advice, and that advice made me better that night. And I look forward to supporting David and helping him to make Vermont better.”
Zuckerman took the opportunity to get a dig in across the aisle, where the lieutenant governor race pitted a Trump-aligned conservative against a moderate Statehouse veteran.
“I’m not sure Republicans could get this many people together, and I’m not sure that they would want to be seen together,” he quipped. “We show that together with unity — with minor differences, but so much more in common — that we will stand together up and down the ticket and across the ticket with all of our fellow candidates.”
Brenda Siegel, who will face incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott in November’s gubernatorial contest, said she had attended two previous unity rallies as a losing candidate in 2018 and 2020. “It was hard to show up” then, she said. But this year, she spoke as the Democratic nominee for governor, having secured the nomination in an uncontested primary.
“Look at the history we are making. We have three LGBTQIA folks on the statewide ticket. We have four women; that has never happened before. We have two single moms on the statewide ticket,” Siegel said. “We have the most women, the most people of color, the most LGBTQIA people on the ballot that we ever had in the history of our state. Nicely done, Democrats. Nicely done, Vermonters.”
The unity rally is a post-primary tradition of the Vermont Democratic Party, but it typically is scheduled just days after Election Day. Tuesday’s rally fell three weeks after the race. Initially, it was scheduled for Aug. 11.
Vermont Democratic Party Executive Director Jim Dandeneau told VTDigger that the delay was due to “a really difficult campaign season where a lot of people were running really hard and folks owed their family some time.”
“Honestly, because of the way that the retirements happened, folks jumped in at the last second. There was no long lead time for a lot of these races,” Dandeneau said. “So folks who had committed to family vacations before they knew they were running — we still had to honor those family vacations.”
